How Shakespeare Came to the Chautauqua Circuit

CHARLOTTE CANNING: The Methodists, who of course were the denomination that founded Chautauqua, had something called the Methodist amusement ban, which threatened members with at best a kind of scolding, at worst actual expulsion from the church for attending amusements, most prominently theater. So theater was a very unwelcome presence in a lot of communities. They saw it as sort of big-city evil, or "the handiwork of the devil," as one memoirist put it.

So the problem was, how do you bring theatrical entertainment to a community that doesn't want theater? Now, they did a lot through elocution, through what we would today call one-person shows, but there was still the sense that theater itself would find a happy home on the circuits if there was a way to present it within a context that audiences would accept. That is, within the sense of morality and good character and uplift that was so, so important to these audiences.

Charles Frohman, who was a very well known producer in the United States, had brought Ben Greet over to the United States in the first few years of the twentieth century, and he had been, Ben Greet had been, a huge hit in the United States. He had been working with a very important and influential director in England called William Poel, and they were part of a larger movement to sort of take Shakespeare back to its roots. They believed that the proscenium arch, box sets, elaborate costumes, elaborate props, spaces between acts to switch the scenery, that none of these served Shakespeare and that Shakespeare should be done in its, what they believed to be, anyway, its original conditions.

So they had had huge success with this over in England and Greet put together a company and brought them to the United States. And they performed at Harvard. They had a very successful performance run there, and then they performed at the White House. So there was a lot of national press attention to Ben Greet and his company, and one of the important things was that in both locations—the White House and Harvard—he performed outside. So there was this really significant sense that Shakespeare was somehow being brought back to a purer, more moral state.

And when the managers were exploring ideas of how to bring theater to the circuits, Crawford Peffer, who was based in New York, was the one who said, "Look, the person to do this is Ben Greet," that he's the one who was going to be able to bring theater in such a way that people will embrace it. Because Shakespeare was almost a sacred text. One actor, who appeared much later when they were doing sort of Broadway shows in the late 20s, said that. He called Chautauqua audiences "a God-fearing people who had their Shakespeare and their Bible." So these audiences were open, I think, to Shakespeare as long as it didn't seem to be a Shakespeare that was tricked out in what they thought of as the brass and tinsel of the theater.